A matter of being surprised mid chit-chat. Impasse and contusion. Stopped out to ricochet through the silence. Caught off guard at a stuttered consonant. There would be no going through with it then. A word breached.
So much agreed upon lost. But the rub, the friction, the clash went badly on this particular collision. That oft-mentioned come together and so habitate part. Expulsed so, feet first, on so many occasions. But farther this time, beyond any possible accompanying voice or touch.
Walk or whimper. So, everything works out, since whimpering is our choral preoccupation. And once you walk, you’re gone. Our original agreement was almost a syntax. To back out of sacred subordination without toppling the cornice, without bruising the meandering fruit. How to buff up the twinkle on the frolic and prepose it to this ardent failure to fulfill. Were we to bind ourselves perpetually, it would still have come undone.
Feigned or not, your indifference eases my imbroglio, lets the moorings dissolve. As I slip down over the edge of silence, I sop up words with forgetfulness. Almost all of a fall’s trajectory is flying. Infinitely miniscule, I am fee fie foed and fummed up into the air, sighed aloft, a tumbling bruise cradled by expectoration. Aspirate soughing between my fingers. Momentary humours over soft pastures. Nestled in passing respite.
Then wafting numbed, like exhaustion down darkening corridors. Picking up the occasional apple, notes in the melody of a score that set extirpation to mumbly music, problems with my teeth, again.
Dying birds, fractured shutters flap back and forth, almost off their hinges, and this is how this shambles blinks under the weak light. Or is it grinning at its own dilapidation?
It is over. Whether it is over or not, it is over. When a heart explodes, is it just another flower blooming? Is the detail of each memory traced by the expanding stain? The cliff along the inside of the silhouette only knows deeper, further away from the surface, from kissing and telling. Once I am submerged I am at one with you and am almost done.
So no more yelling, no more splashing about and gasping for air. There must be other articulations for our extremities. How to snap the wing and alight with less splatter. Words have left us swollen.
And it would be nice to know where I have been snored to. Where is the stretch? What does the last bit look like? Cragged shoreline in the metallic grey light? Precipitous drop beside a dank meadow? Crepuscular wandering between moss-bound trees?
Where ever so, site out of joint, with only arrival and no departure. Crashing into such stillness, riding, splashing into the tom, into the snare, with all the grace of a wounded waterbird doing a fill in the middle of the placid surface of a lake, in the full catastrophe of falling, of advent.
From wild-winged cartwheels in the empty air, to the last gurgling negotiations with submerging, any further under murmurs emerging as a steady lapping.
Setting, slipping away slowly, taking with it all the tenderness in the world, the light under the door can no longer be distinguished from the dark in the distance.
Crossing the shadows. As when fever stretched the limbs out. Longer, over the edge of the bed, knees and elbows on the cold floor, touching the walls and door with sweaty hands and feet. The thinned bones tremble at this new version of flying. Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching rise up into the heights, and still feet remain firmly on the ground.
Delirium in its reaches, flights only in a manner of speaking. But how is it, to extend far afield from a moment. Present, but not here, displaced is always firmly rooted before the first step.
Not even knowing if any ground can be said to be gained horizontally, or as altitude, since the horizon all round has gone black, as is the case with the zenith, and all the rungs leading to it.
Not that mucky circumstances are unfamiliar. But this goes further, is sort of a seamless shuttering in, where the murk moves about at will, absolute at the extremities and more a sort of transparent dark in the middle ground.
Somewhere amongst shades, I have almost managed to betray us. Running out was the last thing still to be done, now that all vows are vows of silence. Drifting over the still darkness, still. My name depleted to a single syllable rolling over itself. But even this is only the slightest of sensations. It turns out there are no terms to finishing.
In this dissipating here, in this half now, chills come and possess me. Blind shivering and all the while the sensation of movement, breaking the seal on that first impression of living. Weak and fetid. The brittle ruins of some pretense. The materials thin out to incoherent whispers. Barely enough to puddle, to daub the tiles or stain a shutter with mold. Had I complied with the glare that bore down, I wouldn’t be blinking through blurry darkness now. I strain my ears and sniff the dank air, but the eyes of exile can’t find your memory anymore.
So that is what it was, a compulsive incision, cutting off everything just before the signature, from this for now colorless and soundless journey, to an also odorless and flavorless cul de sac, where I will dawdle only to be evacuated into oblivion at any given moment, just to ease the indigestion of some vast and bloated metabolism.
It is not how I thought this would go. Alone and adrift within the small print’s black ink. Desire is the betrayal of its making by everything made. It is a movement toward magical instability and fire, a movement away from embracing placement, from serpentine coiling within borders. Desire is the refusal to answer while in search of another question. All this is as ruptured as it is inevitable. But you are desire. You are desire and losing you is irremediable. Though I may linger, I no longer have anything with which to fill my silhouette. Contact with the world dissolves in an electric hiss
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About the Author
The son of Colombian parents, George Mario Angel Quintero was born in 1964 in San Francisco, California, where he spent his first thirty years. He studied literature at the University of California, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Under the name George Angel, he has published poetry, fiction, and essays in English. Since 1995, he has lived in Medellin, Colombia, authoring seven books of poetry, and three books of theater plays all in Spanish under the name Mario Angel Quintero. He continues to write and publish in both English and Spanish. He is also a musician, a visual artist, and a theater director.
